erocity; and indeed the chief function of
games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The
sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent
in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved:
failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the
moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this
fact: for many a deed which is innocent in New Guinea, would in London
provoke the immediate attention of the police.

Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fall-back to past levels of
conduct and experience, a defeat of the spirit of the future in its
conflict with the undying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which to
look at the idea of Salvation? We know that all religions of the spirit
have based their claim upon man on such an offer of salvation: on the
conviction that there is something from which he needs to be rescued, if
he is to achieve a satisfactory life. What is it, then, from which he
must be saved?

I think that the answer must be, from conflict: the conflict between the
pull-back of his racial origin and the pull-forward of his spiritual
destiny, the antagonism between the buried Titan and the emerging soul,
each tending towards adaptation to a different order of reality. We may
as well acknowledge that man as he stands is mostly full of conflicts
and resistances: that the trite verse about "fightings and fears
within, without" does really describe the unregenerate yet sensitive
mind with its ineffective struggles, its inveterate egotism, its
inconsistent impulses and loves. Man's young will and reason need some
reinforcement, some helping power, if they are to conquer and control
his archaic impulsive life. And this salvation, this extrication from
the wrongful and atavistic claims of primitive impulse in its many
strange forms, is a prime business of religion; sometimes achieved in
the sudden convulsion we call conversion, and sometimes by the slower
process of education. The wrong way to do it is seen in the methods of
the Puritan and the extreme ascetic, where all animal impulse is
regarded as "sin" and repressed: a proceeding which involves the risk of
grave physical and mental disorder, and produces even at the best a
bloodless pietism. The right way to do it was described once for all by
Jacob Boehme, when he said that it was the business of a spiritual man
to "harness his fiery energies to the service of